Ancient Bodies, Ancient Liveshttps://ancientbodies.wordpress.com
How can we use material traces of past lives to understand sex and gender in the past?Sat, 31 Jan 2015 21:47:24 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/cf1ad833242338953f334bd23556e0e7?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngAncient Bodies, Ancient Liveshttps://ancientbodies.wordpress.com
Women as Leaders in Early Christianity: Fairy Tales?https://ancientbodies.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/women-as-leaders-in-early-christianity-fairy-tales/
https://ancientbodies.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/women-as-leaders-in-early-christianity-fairy-tales/#commentsThu, 21 Nov 2013 06:42:34 +0000http://ancientbodies.wordpress.com/?p=3087]]>When I find myself approving of the Daily Mail, I have to pause and ask what in the world is going on.

But that is precisely where I find myself: feeling like the Daily Mail, for once, is not sensationalizing a story with its headlines on the reopening of Rome’s Catacombs of Priscilla:

Do these images prove that early Christianity had FEMALE priests? they ask.

Why, thank you for asking. Yes they do.

Which means, the Daily Mail tells us, that the Vatican would regard what I am about to write as a “fairy tale”. Funny: I would call it “scholarship”.

The event that incited the Daily Mail, and other media, is the reopening of the Catacombs of Priscilla in Rome, which date to the third century AD, after a period of conservation. Images of the newly restored frescoes include some that have sparked the suggestions inspiring Vatican authorities to object to “fairy tales” about women playing leading roles in religion in early Christian communities. Reuters quotes Barbara Mazzei of the Pontifical Commission on Sacred Archaeology:

“This is an elaboration that has no foundation in reality.”

One of the images at the center of the controversy shows a frontal female figure, wearing a stole, today understood as a vestment of priests, covering her head, with her hands raised up in a stereotypical pose invoking blessing. A second image has been described as women celebrating the religious feast of the eucharist– the predecessor to the modern Mass. Vatican representatives insist that the frontal woman is simply praying, and that the meal shared by the women in the other scene is merely a funeral banquet, not the eucharist.

Interpreting ancient images is in fact difficult. What has to happen is a careful process of first, documenting what is actually represented (the frontal figure wearing a long garment with another textile draped over the head, with hands raised up); then identifying what those visual elements might have indicated for a viewer at the time (the stole as a possible sign of religious authority, the posture as one of prayer and sacralization, and of course, what tells us that this figure was a woman). But we cannot stop there– because then we end up where the Vatican does: asserting an interpretation by authority alone. It is a woman, yes, she is praying, yes, but she is not a “priest”.

How do we secure the meaning of an image like this? Generations of scholars, in a wide range of fields, have adopted similar strategies. You need to look at the image in relation to other similar images. If male figures with the same features are called “priests”, then you need to justify why, simply due to gender, you won’t extend that identification to identically posed figures that are female.

As the news reports note, the present-day Vatican has modern stakes in arguing that men in the early church were priests, and women were not; this in fact underpins the resistance to ordaining women today. One way to compensate for anachronistic assumptions that might influence interpretation is to look at the broader historical context. We can ask: were women religious leaders at the time? Christianity grew out of Jewish practice, so one place to start is with that practice.

Bernadette Brooten, a professor at Brandeis University, published a book (based on her doctoral dissertation) in 1982 demonstrating that there were women who carried out leadership roles in Roman and Byzantine Judaism from 19 Latin and Greek texts that used titles such as “elder”, “leader”, “head of the synagogue” and (my favorite) “mother of the synagogue”, as well as “priestess”. An article published in 2000 covers the main arguments. In the abstract for that paper, Brooten writes

Jewish women in the ancient Mediterranean lived side by side with communities in which women carried out religious functions, including ritual functions, for example as high priestesses of the imperial cult and female functionaries in the Isis religion. Similarly, Christian women at this time acted as apostles, prophets, teachers, stewards, deacons, church widows, elders and bishops.

Fundamentally, Brooten is reminding us that at the time of the development of early Christianity, women across a wide spectrum of religions were involved as practitioners. It would actually be odd if early Christian women were not involved in leading religious observances.

Serious study of this topic is not something new; one of the key sources, T. B. Allworthy’s Women in the Apostolic Church: A Critical Study of the Evidence in the New Testament for the Prominence of Women in Early Christianity was published in 1917. It is that tradition of scholarship that led to the long list of roles women held in early Christianity– “apostles, prophets, teachers, stewards, deacons, church widows, elders and bishops”– cited by Brooten.

But not “priest”. Ordination, most of these scholars argue, was reserved for males. As some sources note, while the gift of the Holy Spirit came to men and women, only men were selected as the original Apostles. And that, it would seem, is that.

As a historical scholar, this seems to me like nonsense. So Ute Eisen suggested (somewhat more gently) in 2000, in her book Women Officeholders in Early Christianity. She summarized [on page 9] the standard scholarly approach as having three steps: acknowledging that women did have significant roles in the early church, but characterizing those roles as “assisting” others; asserting that because there were no women among the twelve Apostles, women did not serve as leaders “and exercised sacramental functions only in exceptional cases”; and arguing that identifiable named offices held by women were different than the corresponding offices held by men. Eisen cites other scholars questioning “whether it is possible to deduce… any definite and unambiguous conclusions with regard to an ordinary, simple leader of the community and president of the eucharistic celebration in a particular congregation of a later period” from the biblical call to the original twelve male apostles. She notes that

the concept of “priest”… remains quite unclear and is projected… into the early period of Christianity, when in fact we cannot speak of a Christian “priestly office” in the sense of later developments.

To put it another way: what was “priesthood” before it was institutionalized in the way it is recognized today? If the actions men and women carried out overlapped so strongly in the early Church, is it defensible to anachronistically project back in time rigid definitions that came later?

Eisen considers at length [on pages 119-120] the key arguments of Epiphanius, a church leader near the end of the fourth century AD who argued vigorously against women’s ordination as priests. To do so, he had to argue that women who had been called presbytides– priests– were not really regarded the same as men with that title. Eisen notes that Epiphanius is arguing against the understanding these women had of their own role, and the opinion of other members of the Christian community who “acknowledged women as bishops and presbyters and either practiced their ordination to those offices or at least favored it”.

This historical context allows us to return to the images in the Catacombs of Priscilla and say with little doubt that the women shown here were engaged in the same kinds of activities as men leading religious performances at the time– during the third century AD, before Epiphanius and others defined their leadership out of existence.

So where can we find earlier sources to understand women’s roles in the early Christian church? Ann Nyland, a scholar of ancient Greek texts, published an article in the journal Priscilla Papers in 2003 that provides some new light on the subject by using papyri as sources.

She begins with the figure of Phoebe, referred to as the minister for the city of Cenchreae in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, written in the first century AD:

Phoebe is not just a minister, she is a prostates, “presiding officer,” “leader and protector.” The term prostates referred to a person of the front-rank, the chief of a body of people; in general, a ruler, someone who stands in front of the people and protects them.

While the title and role Phoebe held was later redefined as something less, Nyland shows that this later redefinition should not be taken as describing her actual role.

Nyland concludes her scholarly yet accessible paper with words I can only echo:

In the Greek of the New Testament, women are shown to be church leaders, teachers, elders, and deacons. Evidence from the papyri and inscriptions reveals women in these positions at the time of the New Testament and in successive centuries. Yet today, a large faction of Christianity does not permit women to be ministers, and of the Christians that do, most do not permit women to be head ministers. Churches quote what they believe to be God’s Word to support their arguments against women in church leadership. Here is the matter in a nutshell: their arguments are based on a lack of understanding of Greek word meaning according to the findings in the papyri and inscriptions of the last hundred years.

So no, the arguments about the images in the Catacombs of Priscilla are not based on fairy tales.

They are based on scholarship– scholarship that acknowledges historical change, seeks broader contexts, and does not begin with the conclusions that would support a modern ideology.

The article in Cronica de Hoy included passing reference to the identification by North American archaeologist and artist Heather Hurst of the image of a young child in the Bonampak murals as that of a girl, not a boy. Citing an interview with Brittenham, the newspaper wrote

Another discovery occurred in the mural painting of Room 1, where it was thought that the motif was the presentation of the heir of Chaan Muan II [the ruler of Bonampak]. But after the reconstruction made by Heather Hurst, it was discovered that it did not concern a boy, but a girl.

“This could be corroborated and after studying her body paint and clothing, it was confirmed that the person is a small girl and not the male heir, the next Maya ruler that we had supposed.”

The murals are in three rooms located in a row, forming a single building at Bonampak, a Classic Maya city at the eastern edge of Chiapas, Mexico. The anthropology museum at Yale University, where Miller is a professor, has an online exhibit listing that explains the history of rediscovery of the murals, and the project to document them using modern research methods, which began in 1995.

It summarizes the visual content in a few short but effective sentences:

Painted around A.D. 800, these three rooms of paintings reveal, in astonishing detail, the ancient Maya at the end of their splendor, engaging in court rituals and human sacrifice, wearing elegant costumes and stripping the clothing from fallen captives, acknowledging foreign nobles and receiving abundant tribute. No other surviving work features so many Maya engaged in the life of the court, whether second-tier warriors presenting captives to the king or the king’s mother pushed to the side by her imperious daughter-in-law.

As that last evocative phrase indicates, Bonampak is one of the Maya sites that offers glimpses of the experiences of women of the ruling family. An online gallery from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian includes a detail photograph of a group of women seated on a bench, from the mural in Room 3. It also illustrates a detail from a stone monument showing the ruler of Bonampak being assisted in ritual by a woman, identified as “his wife or mother” in the caption.

In 2011, Péter Bíró of the University of Bonn published a review of inscriptions from Bonampak and the larger site to which it is linked, Yaxchilan, that accompany images of noble women. He commented in particular on Bonampak Stela 2, showing the ruler facing one woman, with another standing behind him. In his analysis, the text of the monument records the marriage of Bonampak’s ruler to a woman from Yaxchilan, which would be consistent with a pattern in which more powerful sites used marriages of children of the royal family to bind less powerful sites as political allies.

Hurst’s identification of the heir in the mural as a girl was described in 2002 in the Yale Alumni Magazine:

Hurst… observed that the heir to the throne depicted in Room 1 has a pattern of face paint that elsewhere in the murals is seen only on females, leading the team to speculate that, as Miller puts it, “the availability of only female heirs may have caused some difficulty for the family and may lie behind the creation” of the paintings.

In his original study of the dynastic sequence of Bonampak, Peter Mathews did not identify any ruler later than the patron of the Bonampak murals, Chaan Muwaan II. As Johan Normark notes, Chaan Muwaan II, who ruled until 792 AD, may have been from a different family than previous rulers of Bonampak.

Scholars have long argued that the child in the murals presented as heir never was able to rule. Had she done so, she would have joined a small group of women who were rulers in their own right. Maya archaeology is not quite, yet, to the point of treating such women and girls as normal, if less common, candidates for absolute power, and so having the sole heir be female is treated as if it must have been a source of instability for ancient Maya kingdoms.

What if, instead, we were to accept these royal women as they seem to have been accepted– as first and foremost members of the ruling family, sometimes taking a second place to male heirs in rules of succession, other times acting as important links between powerful families, and even in a few instances successfully ruling and passing on power to their own successors. We would stop being surprised each time another powerful Maya woman’s tomb is identified.

We might then be in a position to think more critically about the histories of ancient Maya realms not strained through a modern lens in which gender trumps class and status. We might recognize the status some Maya women achieved in ritual practice, destroyed during Spanish colonization.

We might get a bit closer to that “king’s mother pushed to the side by her imperious daughter-in-law”.

Here’s how it works: burial discovered with two skeletons; spear near one interpreted as evidence for that body being male. Analysis of bones show that this body is in fact female: conservation of gender ensues: spear reassigned as no longer associated with the buried woman. Gender conserved: system stays the same.

Now in this account, I am an external force acting on the system.

The story, courtesy of Zenobia, Empress of the East, where Judith Weingarten covered this thoroughly back on October 6, starts in September:

Italian archaeologists discovered a remarkable, intact Etruscan burial at Tarquinia…. Within the burial chamber was the complete skeleton of an individual resting on a stone platform with an iron spear lying alongside the body…. a still unopened jewellery box on the opposite narrower platform hints at more treasures to come. On that platform, too, were the incinerated remains of a second person, presumably his wife….

Osteological analysis (reported on 26 September) indicates that the body on the bigger platform was that of a woman who was 35 – 40 years old when she died. And the incinerated corpse on the narrower platform belonged to a male….[Prof. Mandolesi said] “The lance, in all probability, was deposited as a symbol of the union between the two deceased.”

The story started making the rounds in the press this weekend, with headlines emphasizing that scientific analysis had determined the skeleton originally associated with the spear is actually female.

By late today, the US media were reprinting the story (including discussing Weingarten’s blog post) under a uniform headline, He or she? Prince in ancient tomb might actually be princess.

Throughout the reporting, despite Weingarten’s trenchant clarification of the original mistake– which was assigning gender based on associated artifacts assumed to belong to one sex– the media seemed to be unable to understand her other point:

the newly-identified lady still doesn’t get credited with her own lance. The thought doesn’t even arise that it might be a symbol of her power and authority rather than the weapon of a warrior.

If the spear head was associated with the body originally, considered property of that person, then it is inconsistent to change its ownership.

That’s conservation of gender: Spear points are male. So the lady cannot own one.

The thought doesn’t even arise that it might be a symbol of her power and authority rather than the weapon of a warrior.

The closest the media can get to this: maybe instead of a warrior prince, she is a warrior princess.

The thought doesn’t even arise that it might be a symbol of her power and authority.

On Wednesday September 11, Fox News published a report, originally by the AFP, about the discovery of the tomb of Shangguan Wan’er, a Tang dynasty imperial bureaucrat in the Chinese court of Empress Wu Zetian. AFP is the credited source for Fox. But the framing changed in the transition from Agence-France Presse to Fox.

AFP titled their version Tomb found of ancient Chinese female ‘prime minister’.

Fox went with Tomb Found of Ancient Chinese Female Plotter.

Now, maybe the good folks at Fox simply thought US readers would have no idea what a “prime minister” is. But other changes suggest something a bit more intriguing is going on.

AFP writes that Shangguan Wan’er was

a trusted aide to China’s first empress Wu Zetian and is sometimes described as effectively her prime minister.

Fox edits the story to replace the “prime minister” clause with other detail from AFP coverage:

a trusted aide to China’s first female emperor Wu Zetian, and married to Wu’s son, while having relationships with both the empress’s lover and her nephew.

Ahem. Being a political authority– ho hum. Having multiple sexual liaisons– tell us more…

There is an abundant body of writing about this important figure in Chinese history. She was a poet whose works were included in the 1999 book Women Writers of Ancient China, where the editors write that

despite the small size of her extant corpus of poems, Shangguan Wan’er probably played a larger role in male literary culture than any other woman in Chinese history.

Her poetry includes graceful lines about a woman missing her far-away lover, perhaps, the editors write, intended to suggest a woman writing to a soldier-husband:

When first leaves fall on Lake Dongting

I long for you, thousands of miles away

In heavy dew my scented quilt feels cold

At moonset, brocade screen deserted…

Given the abundant documentation, it is worth asking: what is the news here?

The Chinese newspaper Global Timesdescribes the new archaeological find (under the headline: Tomb of Empress Wu’s Secretary Discovered). They describe it as a badly disturbed tomb, with few objects found intact, but including a memorial inscription.

The AFP adds to the basic description speculation by a historian at Shanxi University, Geng Qinggang that there had been a concerted attempt at “official destruction”. The most extensive version of Geng Qinggang’s comments I have found is from the Australian International Business Times:

“The roof had completely collapsed, the four walls were damaged, and all the tiles on the floor had been lifted up…Hence, we think it must have been subject to large-scale, organised damage … quite possibly damage organised by officials.”

Shangguan Wan’er did fall out of power when she was part of a plot against the Emperor Zhongzong, who deposed the Empress Wu Zetian in AD 705. The biography of Shangguan Wan’er in Notable Women of Chinasays that Shangguan Wan’er was named zhaoyi by the new Emperor– described as the highest court title for a woman. She survived a power struggle within the imperial family, aligning herself with the new, equally ambitious empress. After the empress poisoned the emperor in AD 710, Shannguan Wan’er was executed as one of the Empress’ supporters.

That would all tend to support the idea of an official purge of some sort. But the same source ends by noting that the new Emperor, who ordered her execution, also oversaw the collection and publication of her writing. Apparently he shared a high regard for her poetry. And that makes it a little harder for me to imagine him having her tomb– which, after all, he had to have allowed to be constructed– to be attacked.

So. Back to the press coverage: Fox stays consistent, emphasizing the “plotter” narrative until the very last sentence, which adds as an afterthought that “Shangguan Wan’er was also recognized for her poetry”.

We could almost define a spectrum of coverage, from the articles that emphasize sex to those that describe the political and poetic roles that made Shangguan Wan’er famous.

NBC News characterizes her as “scandalous”, and her life “a soap-opera tale of slavery, redemption, intrigue and beheading”. Their story has one of the best photos showing Tang ceramic sculptures of horses and riders in the tomb. They report, and then question, the suggestion of official destruction of the tomb, quoting the response of Yu Gengzhe, a historian at Shaanxi Normal University:

If Shangguan Wan’er died in such shame, why would she have such an extensive tomb? And what happened to her body?

“I presume Shangguan Wan’er’s tomb might have been built during her lifetime…She died and was hastily buried, and the graves were officially destroyed.”

Yu Gengzhe is quoted by Chinese news service CRI.English.com as well. There, he gives what I think is a more straightforward explanation of the damage:

“The tiles on the floor had all been ripped up. Perhaps grave robbers came for the treasures and did not have enough time.”

The prize in terms of salaciousness goes to the UK’s Daily Mail: its headline is practically a short story in itself. Tomb of China’s woman prime minister: The life and lovers of politician who served first female emperor and was eventually executed in a palace coup it reads.

The story highlights intrigue, and adds details I have found in no other source, including claims that the empress admired Shangguan Wan’er for her “qualities of being discerning and manipulative”. Chinese historical texts instead stress the regard the empress had for her ability to compose poetry on the spot. The Daily Mail story is remarkable, in fact, for not mentioning Shangguan Wan’er’s career as a poet at all. That omission helps the Daily Mail nudge Fox out of the running for least informative account of the new find.

The Daily Mail also “enhances” its coverage with an amazing sidebar article that purports to summarize women’s position throughout all of Chinese history, boiling it down to one word: “repressed”.

Which is a pity, since there is an interesting story to be told about the Tang Dynasty and the expansion of women’s scope of action explored by scholars.

Even relatively popular websites might have informed the Daily Mail writers that the Tang Dynasty was a time when women could not be described categorically as “repressed”:

the government allocated land to both male householders and widows….a couple wishing to divorce on the basis of mutual consent and a peaceful process were not to be punished. … it was not unusual for women to divorce or remarry at this time….a widow was not considered to be “unchaste” if she remarried… women were granted the same rights to, and opportunities for, education as men….writing poetry was not merely the privileged pursuit of noblewomen but was also practiced by those of common origins….Tang women also had the chance to learn history, politics, and military skills….They could drink wine to the limit of their capacity, and sing loudly in taverns; gallop through the suburbs with abandon; or even compete with men on the polo field. …women conducted social activities and carried on business independently. They even distinguished themselves within the political arena.

Women like Shangguan Wan’er. A poet, a politician, and a woman with enough sexual freedom to confuse modern reporters.

I wonder about that question a lot: every time the tomb or portrait of a woman of the noble class in Classic Maya society is found, we hear about how surprising it is that there were powerful women. Usually, this is followed by an explanation of why the latest example is an exception, and Maya society was actually male-dominated.

But if the coverage of Maya archaeology seems doomed to resist what we actually know– that women were active political players in many Maya sites, and were recognized economic forces in the household economy– coverage of the Moche seems doomed to find every powerful woman a surprise.

The latest report, of a spectacular tomb at San Jose de Moro, follows by almost twenty years the first reports from the same site of tombs whose principal occupants were women. As the article notes, since 1991 eight such tombs have been documented there:

The accumulating evidence has convinced archaeologists that the site was an important ceremonial and pilgrimage center between A.D. 600 and 850, and that the priestess-queens who were buried there played a large role in governing the political and spiritual affairs of the region—a huge shift in thinking about the structure of Moche society….This site, then, with its elite burials of both genders, suggests that men and women alike filled positions of power in the neighboring communities.

It is really time to move beyond being surprised.

So much has been established, in fact, that in 2010 a blogger named Sam was able to write a pretty nifty essay on Moche “women of power”, concluding that the evidence for women holding positions of power was clear. And the bibliography provided didn’t even include the important work of Melissa Vogel, who by 2003 had put together a convincing argument that Moche women held political positions of power based on cosmologies that gave central roles to female divinities as much as to male divinities.

Nuance, though, has so far escaped most analysis. In 2006, a tomb at the site of El Brujo yielded the remains of another woman. The New York Timesreported:

She was surrounded by weaving materials and needles, befitting a woman, and 2 ceremonial war clubs and 28 spear throwers — sticks that propel spears with far greater force — items never found before in the burial of a woman of the Moche …. Was she a warrior princess, or perhaps a ruler?

“Befitting a woman”??!! Whose gender ideology are we getting here– the Moche, or the New York Times?

For me, the most interesting thing about the latest tomb reported is the description of the wooden coffin in which she was buried: provided with a metal mask and sandals, it is said to have been “anthropomorphized”; Luis Jaime Castillo Butters is quoted as saying “It became a person.”

The author of the story later softens that statement, saying the coffin represented the woman inside. But what Castillo Butters raises is the more interesting possibility– that the coffin itself was a personified object, a thing with a capacity to act. This recalls the active roles of crafted objects in scenes described as “the revolt of the objects“, discussed by archaeologist Jeffrey Quilter. For the Moche, it seems, the boundary between human agency and object agency was not firm.

There is actually a lot more that could be said about gender in Moche society than is captured in the simple expression of surprise that women had positions of authority.

This is, after all, the one Precolumbian group known for creating a body of sexually explicit pottery. Social anthropologist Mary Weismantel has explored how the kinds of sex acts shown on Moche pots may be related to the scenes of death, ancestors, and burial, and the actual use of these pots in burials, identifying a philosophy of the circulation of substances from generation to generation in Moche society.

What both of these kinds of analyses have in common is that they go beyond being surprised that Moche society was not what a Victorian imagination would suggest, to explore how Moche people might have experienced their world: one in which at least some objects had the ability to act autonomously; in which sexuality was tied to the reproduction of humans through complicated intergenerational circulation of substances; and decidedly, a society in which no simple dichotomy between men in power and women under domination would make sense.

Rethinking that assumed dichotomy might make us want to reconsider the Moche woman excavated at the site of El Brujo, in the Huaca Cao Viejo. Buried holding war clubs in each hand, what are we to make of her? A woman in a man’s world?

Or, as Mary Weismantel suggests in her new essay “Towards a Transgender Archaeology” (in Susan Stryker’s The Transgender Studies Reader 2) is it possible that the dichotomy is ours, and that “for the elites who rules these valleys, maybe it wasn’t especially transgressive for a biological female to carry weapons”?

Modern US culture treats sex-based gender as the primary, and guiding form of identity. What those of us working on complex societies in the past are seeing, instead, is that other aspects of identity may be more important.

I look forward to the day when a Moche burial is described without surprise at what the reporters see as a mismatch of sex and other attributes; then we might be on our way to seeing Moche society in terms that may legitimately surprise us, by teaching us something new.

This was the story told about the Maya “Sacred Well”, the Cenote at Chichen Itza, as popularized by an interview Alma Reed conducted with Edward Thompson, in 1923 in the New York Times, where Reed wrote

prisoners of war and virgins of flawless loveliness were sacrificed at the cenote. From early childhood the maidens had been cared for with physical perfection as a goal. Their spiritual training had martyrdom for the public good as its ideal. (Reprinted in El Palacio)

As the joke I heard went: I understand how the physical anthropologists can tell they are female; but how can they tell they were virgins?

As recently as 2003, the writer of a National Geographicfeature about Maya underwater archaeology in Yucatan still felt the need to mention (and debunk) the sacrificial virgin story. The author quoted archaeologist Carmen Rojas:

Until the 1960s many people, including many archaeologists, thought virgins were the only individuals whose stories had ended in the cenotes. “We learned then that they were not all young girls…And now we know that they were not all sacrifices.”

Now add Cahokia to the list of sites where the story of mass sacrifice of young women has been called into question.

The Western Digsblog describes research by Andrew Thompson, published in the July issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, who applied a new approach to identifying the sex of bodies from Mound 72 at Cahokia.

This is a famous (the blog says, infamous, and who am I to disagree?) feature, part of “the largest display of ritual killing found anywhere north of Mexico”, a pit

lined from corner to corner with skeletons — 53 in all — neatly arranged two bodies deep, each layer separated by woven fiber mats. The victims all appeared to be women, mostly in their late teens or early 20s. Evidence suggested they were strangled, or perhaps cut at the throat, at the edge of their shared mass grave, and then interred, meters away from an ornate burial of two men thought to be clan elders, political leaders, spiritual guides, or all three.

A powerful image of systematic, gendered violence, on which much has been built. Western Digs cites nonspecific “experts” as having described the 53 women imagined buried in Mound 72 as “unblemished”, saying “some speculated that they were virgins”.

University of Illinois archaeologist Tim Pauketat, the most recent archaeologist to conduct sustained research at Cahokia, was clear about this in an interview in 2009: selection of young women of a certain age, yes, but some had clearly given birth.

Coverage of Pauketat’s then-new book on Cahokia in the popular press was a lot less careful. Writing for Salon, Andrew O’Hehir titled his article Sacrificial virgins of the Mississippi, and added that the 53 women in Mound 72 were “quite possibly selected for their beauty”.

Beauty and virginity.

Neither, of course, particularly evident in skeletal remains.

In fact, the majority of the skeletons from Cahokia could not be assigned a biological sex: Thompson says that less than half of the skeletons from Mound 72 could be assigned a sex originally, and less than half of those were assessed to be certainly female. That’s less than a quarter of the buried individuals.

Thompson, a PhD candidate at Indiana University, tried a new idea: using teeth, more durable than bone, to assign sex to the skeletal remains at Cahokia.

Like all such research, his work will no doubt be open to questioning. He is quoted online as acknowledging that “There is, of course, quite a bit of overlap in tooth size between sexes, and this varies between populations”. He needed to construct a comparative framework for analysis, using other local sites with better preservation.

And even then, he still found a bias toward female victims: in the main burial pit, he identified 8 of the 53 individuals as male, very close to the 17% frequency of males in Mound 72 burials that he found overall.

Does it matter that it isn’t entirely women, if women were disproportionately victims of violence here?

I think it does. If nothing else, it should help counter the easily inflamed imagination that still, in the 21st century, leads popular writers to equate all female with all virgin (and all beautiful).

That might allow us to get beyond a kind of snuff-film moment and ask what factors led to the selection of any person for ritual burial?

For Chichen Itza, that moment has already come. Archaeologist Guillermo de Anda argues that for cultural reasons, the human victims there were more likely male than female. Eighty percent of the sample he analyzed from one cenote were, he said, children between the ages of 3 and 11.

As archaeologist Traci Ardren wrote in an overview of child sacrifice in Mesoamerica, this may reflect the “purity and strength” of children’s connection to the divine. For the Aztecs, I have argued, young children were not completely separated from the gods who gave them to human parents as gifts, until they had lived and been socialized for some time, making them appropriate messengers to the gods.

There is an opportunity now at Cahokia to revisit ideologies and ask similar questions. If a consistent 15-17% of those buried in this way were male, perhaps the selection of victims was based less on their sex than on some other quality shared by both males and females.

If, as Pauketat indicates, some of the women had given birth, and others perhaps had not, are we safe to assume that all those who were biologically female formed a single category? In other Native American societies, age mattered as much as sex, and maturation and especially being a parent was a moment that marked a transition to adulthood. What is the age appropriate for sacrifice at Cahokia?

And– might we revisit the easy application of a two sex/two gender model here, knowing that many Native American peoples recognized more than two genders, and these can be evident archaeologically?

It may not be as sexy. But it would be a whole lot more anthropological.

Grace Brooks is amazing, and we should know more about her– and her family, friends and neighbors. Now, thanks to new archaeological work, we will.

When she died in 1810, the Easton Republican Starpublished an obituary:

Yesterday, the 12th instant Grace Brooks of this town, and a native of Talbot county, departed this life, aged perhaps near seventy years, after a tedious and pining decline of some years, which she sustained with all the Heroism and Resignation of a patient Christian, which the members of the society, to which she attached herself are ready to bear witness to – although of sable hue, by her industry and economy, after emancipating herself, her children and grand children, she has left decent property to her descendants. Philis Wheatley and Benjamin Banniker, have left memorials of their talents, that while the page of history continues, will never be obliterated; and so Grace Brooks has left an impression on the hearts of all who knew her many virtues and services, that will never be forgotten while they possess recollection – white and black, are the offspring of the Divine Creator.

Archaeologist Dale Green of Morgan State University sums up the importance of the new project in the Washington Post:

“It’s the oldest free black, African American neighborhood in the country that has been continuously inhabited and still in existence… In 1790, there were 410 free persons of color who lived on what we know as the Hill”.

For many readers in the US, the history of African Americans is the history of slavery and emancipation. That is why projects like the current excavation of “the Hill” are so important: they document the deep history of free people of African descent, whether previously enslaved or not, in the territory of the US.

Today, archaeologists across the country are exploring the remains of towns and farming communities established by free African Americans. They are recalling the histories of wealthy black whalers on Nantucket, and farmers in New Mexico and in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

Many of these places date to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Hill is not the earliest known free black settlement in what became the US. That was founded in 1738 under Spanish colonial administration: Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, or Fort Mose, in what today is Florida.

But the community from Fort Mose relocated to Cuba when the Spanish lost Florida to the British in 1763.

The Hill is a neighborhood of free blacks in the early years of the United States that persisted.

Documentary research shows the many ways that African descendants became free citizens in the eighteenth century. Quakers living in Easton in 1766 responded to preaching by John Woolman by freeing enslaved people. Enslaved Africans freed by the will of “Easton sea captain Jeremiah Banning“, who died in 1798, also joined the community

Then there is Grace Brooks “who purchased her freedom and that of her children and grandchildren with money she earned as a midwife”. Her history in Talbot County, and the network of related people who moved near her following her lifetime lease of property in 1792, is discussed by historian Jennifer Hull Dorsey in her 2011 book Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland.

According to a local history blogger, Brooks paid 70 pounds in 1788 for her freedom, and that of her daughter and granddaughter. In 1794 and again in 1797, Brooks used income she earned as a midwife to free first a son, then another granddaughter. As the blog post notes, her obituary (reproduced above) showed how important a member of the community Brooks had become.

The same blogger reproduces in full a will dated 1808 from Brooks, a remarkable document for any woman, white or black, at this early date in the republic. In it, Brooks describes herself as “a free black woman”, and leaves the use of land during her lifetime to “my friend Susan or Suckey Bailey, a black woman”, the proceeds of the sale of her land to be divided equally among her four grandchildren, male and female alike: “Phill, Jane and Nancy, son and daughters of my dear deceased daughter Phobe, and Grace the daughter of my dear deceased son David Brooks”. Brooks specifically directed that if Grace, her granddaughter, were to die before her, her portion of the estate would go to Nancy. Nancy also received her household property, and the responsibility for paying off any debts that might remain.

The current archaeological project is centered on land where the 1790 US census says there were three black residents, whose names are unrecorded. As archaeologist Green said,

“We don’t know if they were women….We don’t know if they were men. We just know they were free and they were black.”

Which is not a small thing to know. In the materials being recovered, we have glimpses of the everyday lives of people that documents don’t provide: “nail stock”, metal used to hand produce potentially marketable tools, oyster shells that evoke images independent people of raising chickens for their own use, or for sale.

As Carlene Phoenix, described in the news coverage as president of Historic Easton, the local nonprofit that encouraged archaeological research, says

“The thing about Talbot County is, it’s rich in history… But when it comes to especially African American history, it was always about slavery. But now we’ve got another story.”

I can’t help it; that was my reaction when I read the story in England’s Daily Telegraph; the headline is intriguing (Walrus remains found buried under St Pancras station in London; A Pacific walrus has been discovered among a 19th century human burial underneath St Pancras Station in London) but it was this sentence that set me off:

“The bones were in a coffin with eight other sets of human remains”.

“Eight other sets”?!

Obviously, the reporter didn’t mean to elevate walruses to human status, but then: “we are all together”, as the song goes. The place was a cemetery; the human bodies buried there, in the imagination of the reporter, were disposed of properly, in the manner of people.

So the walrus gets promoted to personhood.

Except that the equation probably should go the other way.

The original burial was part of a graveyard containing at least 1500 human bodies, removed when the old train station was renovated. The burial of eight human beings in the same coffin reportedly reflects their use in medical research “sometime after 1822″.

In 2006, the magazine British Archaeologycovered the archaeology being carried out at St Pancras Station. It noted that St Pancras church burying ground was disturbed in the 1860s during the original construction of the railway station, and gives an excellent history of the use of this cemetery:

The parish of St Pancras lay on the fringe of the growing metropolis and offered cheap housing. It absorbed successive waves of migrant workers associated with construction of the Regent’s Canal in the 1820s, the Imperial Company Gasworks in 1822, and the railways from the 1830s onwards. The burial ground saw very heavy use. It was closed in 1854…

So our walrus presumably made it into his final resting place between 1822 and 1854.

In the current news article, archaeologist Phil Emery described efforts to find some historical record of a walrus in records of the London Zoological Society, without success. The article goes on to give the best guess the researchers have:

The most plausible reason for the walrus being in London was that it was brought to the city by whalers and sold for medical research or as a curiosity.

Which may well be true– but what piques my curiosity is the decision to bury the walrus along with (it seems) human bodies used in medical research. Why would the bones not be kept as a zoological specimen, entered into a museum or even a private collection?

Archaeologists generally don’t talk about the things we cannot begin to explain.

The burial of humans and a walrus, intermingled in a single coffin, requires us to face other possibilities.

For the people who placed these remains in what at the time was an over-crowded cemetery in a declining neighborhood of London, the human bodies were, like the walrus, not really people, but materials. Using an established cemetery as a disposal location was pragmatic.

We may never know precisely how they gained access to a Pacific walrus, or what they thought they gained from it. But this was, after all, the time of the “resurrection men” who committed atrocities ranging from exhumation to murder to provide anatomists with specimens:

Public hysteria eventually led to the Anatomy Act in 1835, which aimed to stem the illegal trade by allowing surgeons to appropriate the corpses of the “friendless”, or unclaimed…patients who died could, after a decent burial, be discreetly disinterred and moved onto the dissection table. This continued even after the Anatomy Act was passed…Although the hospital chaplain insisted on reburying the manipulated bones, the new law allowed surgeons to use the deceased’s body without his or her consent.

The ultimate outcome was the modern system that requires informed consent for medical use of human remains. Archaeologists working on nineteenth century cemeteries remind us that not so long ago, to be poor meant your body might be someone else’s object of study.

Filed under: archaeology, embodiment, gender, history Tagged: animality, archaeolgy, burial, dissection, medical research, St Pancras]]>https://ancientbodies.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/i-am-the-walrus/feed/1rajoyceReflections on Young People and Gender Categorieshttps://ancientbodies.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/reflections-on-young-people-and-gender-categories/
https://ancientbodies.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/reflections-on-young-people-and-gender-categories/#commentsThu, 18 Jul 2013 04:17:10 +0000http://ancientbodies.wordpress.com/?p=2896]]>Note: I posted this on What Makes Us Human; reposting it here because I would be interested in dialogue with readers who might have had related experiences– please comment, but know all comments are moderated and there may be a delay before I get to them.

The story from NPR is headlined Young People Push Back Against Gender Categories.

Not everything in it was familiar– I have not (yet) had students introduce themselves by specifying their preferred pronouns.

But in general, the article resonated with me.

I have for years taught a course in spring term called “Archaeology of Sex and Gender” to around 100 undergraduates, drawn from all over the university. I wrote a book based on this experience, trying to explain the topic simply, to both students and the general public.

My goal is to demonstrate how archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, historians, and art historians find ways to explore sex and gender in the past, when they don’t have the luxury of just talking to people or observing their behavior.

This is my area of expertise; but teaching this interdisciplinary course, that satisifies one of Berkeley’s distribution requirements, has been really challenging. Trying to explain to students, most of whom have never questioned the naturalness of a simple correspondence between two sexes and two genders, how historical scholars can understand societies that recognized more than two sexes, more than two genders, takes work.

When we take the next step beyond that, to consider how sex/gender may better be understood as a fluid spectrum, I expect to face the strongest objections.

And that was true, for the first few years. Then for a variety of reasons, I stopped teaching the course.

When I started again in 2012, I wondered if I was just not remembering how the course had gone. The students seemed to be ahead of me from day one. The opening exercise– simply listing how we recognize what gender or sex someone is– was too complicated– it was where we were supposed to end up, not begin.

This spring, the second time around after I started teaching the course again, I was certain. Things had changed– as I said to a group of students, I now anticipate that I won’t be able to teach the course– at least, as it is set up now.

Why? they asked me. I moved us off the topic, alert to the temptation of letting us get off topic. But I kept thinking about what I was noticing as the class unfolded.

Students, without my prompting, used the term “cisgender” when talking about people who understood themselves in terms of the gender they were assigned at birth. When I was introducing the concept of multiplying gender categories, before I could point out that more categories are still boxes, students proposed that gender is fluid, a spectrum. Some of them suggested that even a spectrum or continuum of gender was a problematic concept, because it presumed a single dimension of variation. From week one, there were students ahead of me, even if they lacked the precision of analysis they needed to engage their understanding with scholarly work.

Because where my endorsement of gender as fluid, multidimensional, and non-categorical came from a history of theoretical engagement, theirs came from their everyday life: who they were, who their friends were, how they imagined the world was and should be.

So when I read the NPR story, I heard echoes of my own students. Students who were as likely to talk about each other in the plural (“like they said”) or by name, as use referential pronouns that assume two genders corresponding to two sexes.

Of course, not all the students were equally adept, equally informed, equally concerned about terms of reference, not making assumptions about identity, or prepared to refer to cisgender and transgender persons.

But when I asked the group, late in the semester, to do a “one minute question” and write how they would explain to someone else how to think about sex/gender, having had this course, something unexpected happened.

Along with a group that continued to define sex as the biological ground for corresponding genders (a position I hope students will feel free to defend, even though I disagree), there was an equally large group that described gender and sex, both, as cultural conceptions that artificially enforced stable identity on a more fluid continuum or spectrum of identity. A third group said they would describe gender as a personal experience, something outside social or cultural control, an internal state that could not be assessed without the testimony of the person.

While I wasn’t teaching this material, a new generation has formed: already thinking of gender as something that should not be a categorical identity imposed on them; ready to create space for their peers, not just for their own freedom to define themselves as they feel appropriate.

And if NPR is right, the next generation may be even more challenging– and interesting.

Filed under: embodiment, gender, sex/gender, teaching]]>https://ancientbodies.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/reflections-on-young-people-and-gender-categories/feed/8rajoyceAnd a Little Child Shall Lead Themhttps://ancientbodies.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/and-a-little-child-shall-lead-them/
https://ancientbodies.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/and-a-little-child-shall-lead-them/#commentsSun, 21 Apr 2013 17:49:25 +0000http://ancientbodies.wordpress.com/?p=2799]]>I have to admit that I was a little mystified when Archaeology online recently publicized research that used errors in working a single stone tool to propose that its less-skilled maker was probably a child.

Not that I think the idea is implausible.

Errors in production have been a staple of the archaeology of childhood for a long time now, with studies of both stone tools and pottery pointing out that learning implies developing skill, so that learners should be detected through products made with less skill.

Over a decade ago, Kathryn Kamp (in 2001) and Patricia Crown (in 1999) proposed that children learning to make pottery would have produced characteristic products that showed less skill and/or more error. They both drew on general theories of cognitive development, stressing that children would only be able to carry out particular steps in production, or indeed, conceive of a production sequence, at specific ages. Crown’s study assessed the likely age of the maker by examining how designs were drawn, relying on cognitive studies showing children develop skills for different steps in drawing at different ages.

Nor have such analyses been limited to pottery.

In 2006, John Shea published “Child’s Play: Reflections on the Invisibility of Children in the Paleolithic Record” in Evolutionary Anthropology. In this article, Shea provided an exceptionally clear model of what we might expect the evidence of children learning to work stone tools would look like.

Among other things, he noted that “learners are profligate knappers”. In his experience teaching students, they produced twice the debris that he, as a more accomplished crafter, did. This led him to observe that a large proportion of ancient lithic assemblages might actually testify to the presence of beginners:

learners’ knapping byproducts could actually outnumber those of competent adult knappers in some assemblages.

Shea also observed that learners produced the most variable assemblages; he suggested that “stone tools made or used by children are likely to be relatively small, to fit the small hands of their makers or users”; and that learners would likely have been restricted to local, easily acquired, low cost materials.

Many of Shea’s suggestions are exemplified in a lovely article published in 2008 in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. Called “Playing With Flint: Tracing a Child’s Imitation of Adult Work in a Lithic Assemblage”, the article presents a case study from a Neolithic site in Sweden, based on theories of learning as a social activity.

The author, Anders Högberg, detects spatial evidence of a single highly skilled craft worker, producing a highly stylized tool type, surrounded by debris from lithic working that was significantly more varied, “the unsystematic production of flakes”. The skilled producer used high quality raw material, while the “unsystematic” work was on low quality material. His conclusion is that a skilled adult worked on a formal tool, observed and imitated by a child who moved around more, and who, while able to produce worked flakes, did not do so to the systematic ends of the worker being imitated.

So what surprised me wasn’t that an archaeologist had proposed that a child had made a less-than-perfect stone tool; it was that Archaeology apparently thought this was news, when in the research world I inhabit, it is decidedly not.

My reaction to studies like this is somewhat different. Since we have long used evidence of less skilled craft production as a way to infer the presence of children, we have also faced the fact that the equation is neither simple nor automatic.

We debate whether we should assign the role of learner automatically, or primarily, to children. One of the things I like about Kathryn Kamp’s decade-old article on Sinagua pottery making is that, while she reviews the literature on children’s motor skills and cognitive capacities, when it comes to talking about the archaeological evidence, she asks how we can see “beginners”. Not children– beginners.

Then there is the problem of identifying error. Kamp provides cautious guidelines, noting that while beginners probably often do make errors and produce “imperfect products”, there are reasons why an experienced crafter might produce a less-than-perfect product. This point is echoed by others.

What makes the study by Anders Högberg so useful is that it mobilizes a number of different kinds of evidence within a framework that acknowledges all these issues, to conclude convincingly that the less systematic crafting at the site was likely done by a child.

His use of the word “unsystematic” avoids a problem in interpreting some craft products as showing “errors”. It is only when he considers whether this could be an adult that the word “error” even comes up:

The trials and errors of a skilled toolmaker would exhibit flake material which revealed a purpose of making an artefact recognisable as a typological form.

This makes the definition of a skilled craft worker clearer: someone who works with a purposeof making something systematically is fully embedded in a craft.

Högberg then is able to contrast children– not just beginning learners– with skilled adults by emphasizing play as characteristic of the cognitive approach of a child: unsystematic by definition, even though based on imitation.

I do not want to assume that the Archaeology magazine news item fully represents the study it mentions. So I do not conclude that the author, Sigrid Alræk Dugstad of Stavanger University, is uninformed by this preceding literature.

Indeed, much of the leadership in the archaeology of childhood came from Scandinavian archaeologists following in the footsteps of Grete Lillehammer, who published an important article on archaeology of childhood in 1989. Högberg cites this tradition of research in his article, and Lillehammer herself wrote the introduction for a collection of papers, where Dugstad apparently made the argument that is now getting attention.

In the conference program, Dugstad’s paper appears with the title “How abortive artefacts can be informative archaeological research objects”, as part of a session dedicated to children as stone tool makers. The abstract for her conference paper touches on the points made in the other studies mentioned here– play, learning, and the importance of looking at stone tool products in context:

Teaching skills and passing on knowledge were very important, and we can assume that much of the transfer of knowledge happened relatively early in life, either through play or more structured apprenticement. Technological processes, tools, waste and retouched pieces as well as their context and associations can give opportunities to get closer to individuals, e.g. children.

So how do we get from this research, clearly part of a rich, decades-long tradition that has developed strong grounds for inferring children’s actions, to the flat-footed pronouncement that “Stone Age Kids Learned by Doing”?

The Archaeology brief note was based on a press release from the University of Stavanger. The Archaeology note is so brief that it never makes clear that the press release cites a source, an article, titled “Early child caught knapping: A novice early Mesolithic flintknapper in southwestern Norway”.

Frustratingly, though, the university press release does not give a full citation of the publication venue. But despite the changed title, this almost certainly refers to the paper in the 2010 conference volume Socialisation.

I have not been able to obtain a copy of the conference volume to see the full paper included there. What the press release suggests is that the study was firmly rooted in, and fully cognizant of, the wider body of work about children, crafting, and learning in the past. Dugstad is cited as saying that

a succession of failed strokes, terminating in many hinge and step fractures, indicates that axe was made by a novice flintknapper, probably a child.

Where Dugstad’s argument appears to differ from the other examples cited here is in taking a single, less well shaped artifact as a kind of signature of a novice, who she infers would have been a child:

the axe has probably not been produced by an adult. Errors are too numerous and striking to have been performed by a skilled and experienced flintknapper. This is probably a child’s work.

Other researchers have urged more caution, taking a comparative approach that sketches out contrasts between more and less well made products within a single social setting. Dugstad is quoted as suggesting that a more experienced craft worker would have had the skill necessary to correct errors, rescuing the work in progress, rather than repeatedly trying to fix one error and making another, leading to the discard of the tool in question:

one can see that the axe was made by a person with poorly developed theoretical knowledge and motoric skills. Given the numerous and characteristic failed strokes, it is also probable that the beginner had not received any form of direct instructions on how to proceed in manufacturing the tool.

The key phrase here is “poorly developed theoretical knowledge and motor skills”. These comments are not included in the Archaeology news item.

Consideration of the relatively undeveloped motor skills and cognitive challenges of children as learners has been central to the arguments about children learning crafts that have been published over the last decade.

Theories of learning do more than point us toward analyses of errors in production. In a paper published in the book The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica, Jeanne Lopiparo suggested that adults in the Ulúa Valley of Honduras between 500 and 1000 AD made molds to help beginning learners– specifically children– produce competent examples of figurines. As I described her conclusions in Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives,

molding served as a technology that allowed anyone, regardless of skill, to produce an image that was recognizable and that represented the contributions of different people to the social group. Lopiparo suggested that children would have been especially important participants in the crafting of figurines, learning how to be members of their society through their participation in the shaping of these conventionalized images.

The archaeology of childhood crafting is probably one of the best examples of how to think through identifying human actors in convincing ways using material traces. I just wish that Archaeology online had used its wide reach to help people understand just how rich and well developed this literature actually is.